Articles Tagged with Governance

A critical factor in achieving speed of execution is being clear about who gets to make which decisions. Governance is about establishing a framework to ensure that all decisions are made by the right person or persons, according to the importance of the decision and the expertise and organizational responsibilities of the parties to the decision. Decisions with large financial impact must be made by senior managers as part of an ongoing management process, while those with lesser impact are more efficiently made by those who are accountable for executing the decisions.

I’ve been speaking a lot lately about the importance of IT governance, especially as it relates to driving cloud (public, private, hybrid) adoption in the enterprise. Although IT governance is critical to the success of having a flexible and agile enterprise, having an overarching enterprise architecture to show how all the components of the enterprise are related and to guide the decisions that affect IT is just as important.

Many IT and DevOps shops always look at governance as a dirty word because it sounds too much like government, which sounds too much like bureaucracy and waste. The problem with governance is not with governance itself, but with how organizations have tried to implement (or not implement) it. Gartner defines IT governance as

…the processes that ensure the effective and efficient use of IT in enabling an organization to achieve its goals.

That doesn’t sound so scary now does it? Yet very few organizations have done a good job of enforcing the policies, procedures, and architecture principles required for IT to ever achieve its mighty goals. Until now.

The OpenStack Governance Model is changing to remove the dominance of Rackspace by establishing an independent foundation. We were very critical of the old model, so we spoke to Rackspace to understand what was happening.